


Ghost Stories, Resurrection Songs

by crescentmoonthemage



Series: Sing to Me Finality [2]
Category: James Bond (Craig movies)
Genre: 007!Q, Agent!Q, Established Relationship, Flashbacks, Hurt/Comfort, James Bond Being James Bond, Kidnapping, M/M, Post-SPECTRE, Q (James Bond) is a Holmes, Q is a Holmes brother, Sequel, Terrorists, you and me and espionage makes three
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-07
Updated: 2020-10-04
Packaged: 2021-03-05 22:00:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,562
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25762516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crescentmoonthemage/pseuds/crescentmoonthemage
Summary: PART TWO OF "SING TO ME FINALITY", SEQUEL TO "THE SAVING OF LAZARUS"This is a story in three parts.It is a story about the familiar, or, about the unknown. Here is something that Q knows: life is continuing as normal, if normal can be such a thing again. Except now, there’s an ex-Double Oh sleeping in his bed and remembering how he takes his coffee. Here is something Q doesn’t know: when the other shoe will drop.It is a story about the brave new world, about moving forward. About what comes after. The last world ended with blood in an alley, and the next began in a restaurant in Camden.It is a story about time, and the man who defied every single odd to have it. To steal time from the gods, this is the gift of James Bond. James Bond: ex-agent, current agent handler. James Bond, who has never had a spare moment in his life, now has too many, piling on top of each other without structural support and threatening imminent catastrophe.After the fidelity, and the honesty, and the legacy, there is only infinity, stretching onward into the great unknown.The inevitability of time, don’t you think?
Relationships: James Bond/Q, Minor or Background Relationship(s), background Sherlock Holmes/John Watson
Series: Sing to Me Finality [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1726807
Comments: 4
Kudos: 30





	1. Prologue: Such Things as Promises

**Author's Note:**

> Well, hello my lovelies, and WELCOME to this triumphant return to Lazarus-verse! Bear in mind that this story is still largely unwritten, though very much planned, and so updates will be extremely sporadic. However, since life is about to get busy again, and I promised to begin this summer, here's a little something to keep you going! In addition to this, you have my solemn promise that I will finish this story- I won't leave you hanging! It may be slow, but it will be completed.
> 
> To my loyal readers who I've seen since Lazarus, welcome back! To any new readers, it's nice to meet you! Please read the first part in the Sing To Me Finality series first, as this will make no sense without reading Lazarus. 
> 
> As always, enjoy, and leave your comments and thoughts down below! 
> 
> All my love,  
> CM

Prologue: Such Things as Promises

“007, _do_ be careful,” comes the voice over the comm.

He smiles, wolfishly, even though no one can see. “I’m always careful.”

A scoff echoes in his ear, coming across as a bit of a crackle. Being in a wet and grimy sewer comes with certain perks, including (but not limited to) bad reception. “No you’re not. And don’t pretend like you are.”

James glances down around him, to the sewer water sopping through his expensive shoes, to the _smell,_ to the gun in his hand, and to the man he’s following, just up around the next corner. “No,” he agrees, finally. “I’m not. But I will be, is that enough for you? And if I die down here, I’ll come back. I’ll haunt you.”

The fact that Q is smiling is evident from the very timbre of his voice, and James idly wonders when he’d started knowing the Quartermaster so much as to _not_ know him, as it were. “Promise it.”

* * *

As it turned out, he hadn’t died in that sewer, but he had _died,_ which is perhaps why this odd snippet of memory returns to strike him at sudden and unexpected times. Perhaps he hadn’t come back to life at all. Perhaps he’s fulfilling the taciturn promise he’d once made, back in Bulgaria in the stink and the grime. The haunting.

Or perhaps Q is just very, very good at his job, and this is why he is still alive, somehow, to remember such things as promises. _Lazarus,_ he had called them both, so long ago now, when the world had been falling apart at the edges. Q had answered in an instant with that steady certainty that was his and his alone, answering the question James hadn’t really asked out loud. There _had_ been a question, a mocking question, but Q had seen right through the bravado and cut at the heart of him, to the fear beneath. They have always known each other like this. He doesn’t know why it still surprises him.

_The world isn’t done with us yet,_ Q had said. _Perhaps we still have some good to do._

He’d heard it again, in the after. In the haunting. He’d been drifting, there, in that uncertainty, and M had pulled him back down to the dry dirt with those same words: “Don’t you have some work to do?” _Don’t you have some good to do?_

“Yes,” he had said. Heart beating. Wounds healing. Pieces and parts and the possibility of happiness. A future, as it were.

_I’ll haunt you._

_Promise it._


	2. Part One: Integrity. Chapter One: The Other Shoe

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It’s uncomfortable, but so have been the last two and half years. So it’s nothing new.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello lovelies, our first real chapter! I hope you enjoy! Still very busy, and so updates will be extremely limited, but rest assured, I am writing!
> 
> Leave your comments down below and enjoy! :)
> 
> \--CM

Part One: Integrity

Chapter One: The Other Shoe

_Resurrection_ , thinks Q idly, _might have been the easy part._

He had returned home to find a secret agent sleeping on his couch. Not that this was a shock, per se, or an unexpected and nasty surprise, but it was _a_ surprise, given that the aforementioned secret agent was supposed to be doing official diplomatic business on loan to the CIA, and, he most certainly was not.

The agent in question, _Bond, James Bond,_ spy of spies, killer of men, breaker of hearts, friend to cars and guns and pretty women aplenty, currently looks about as deadly as a kitten curled on Q’s pull-out sofa. His breathing is even and slow, and his face is peaceful in the stripes of golden late-afternoon light sneaking in through the drawn blinds.

The Q in question, Lysander Quentin, Quartermaster, owner of the flat, hacker extraordinaire, younger brother and cat lover and wine drinker alike, smiles at Bond fondly, covers him with a blanket from the closet, and gets out the ingredients to make carbonara.

* * *

It’s not a problem, except that it is. The other shoe, monstrosity that it must be, has refused to drop, which makes Q more and more anxious with each passing day, not that he’d ever really show it. That first shoe had fallen three months ago, smack-dab in the middle of the events referred to now at MI6 as _pulling a Code Lazarus._

That was probably the heart of the issue.

 _Pulling a Code Lazarus_ meant nothing more to most of the Six employees with clearance enough to know about it, even Bond’s green-team-brand-new 00 trainees, than a medical problem. A heart stopping and then restarting, and the subsequent recovery therein. Such things happened often enough at MI6 in one way or another that it was bound to get an exciting name eventually, no matter that the medical world already had terms aplenty for it.

For Q, Code Lazarus meant quite a bit more. It was his term, after all, his and Bond’s, coined in the middle of a drunken conversation where too many things were pulled to the surface. Unfortunately, all names come with a reason, and that reason was the newest scar on Bond’s chest, an ugly entry-exit wound just below the ribs. Code Lazarus. Death in action. Medical salvation. Painful and visceral. The kind of thing people love to watch in hero movies.

Q doesn’t like those kinds of movies much anymore. 

No matter that he’s seen agents die. It’s his job, if not to save them, than to be the one that watches. After all, not everyone can be saved. And it’s not the death, either. He’s seen death before. He’s _caused_ death before. And this particular case, the case behind the name, hadn’t even been a death. It had a happy ending, something everyone at Six had rejoiced at. There were so few happy endings in the spying business. So, theoretically, it should be easier.

It’s not. And he doesn’t know why.

Perhaps it was the fact that it had been someone he loved. He knows that, now. He loves James, and James loves him, and they’re all peas-in-a-pod enough to make Eve stick her tongue out at them sometimes at work when they come in together from the garage. Perhaps it was because every other time there had been some level of detachment: a computer screen, a radio, a feeling of inevitability, a certain _there’s nothing I could have done._ But not there. It had been his own senses—hearing, seeing, smelling—and it had been his own fault. If they hadn’t fought, James wouldn’t have been kidnapped. If he hadn’t let a mole into his department, they would never have had to go to San Francisco in the first place. If, if, if. And for every _if_ , he knows one thing: it had been his doing.

They do what they do best. They work. Q immediately, James after he recovers. They work, and they joke, and now they fuck and cook and Bond knows what kind of cat food to buy. And they’re good at it. At life, at each other.

But something is still wrong, and both of them know it, and neither of them can put a finger on it. Not with them, and not with life, just with.

It’s uncomfortable, but so have been the last two and half years. So it’s nothing new.

* * *

Q’s putting garlic bread into the oven when he hears movement from behind him. “You’re supposed to be with Felix drinking bad American beer,” he chastises, but there’s no real heat in it.

Bond comes up behind him and snakes sleepy arms round his waist. “But Felix doesn’t tease me quite so well.”

Q jokingly slaps his hands away. “Get off me, you old cad. Don’t you know that hitting on younger men is frowned upon?”

Bond rumbles laughter at him, but steps away, allowing Q to turn, bracing his hands on the counter, and look at him. “In all seriousness, why aren’t you in Langley?”

James shrugs a little, looking sleepy and jetlagged. “Apparently M tested our new candidates while I was gone and deemed them fit to be sent out on trials, so he brought me home for a few days to oversee sending them out. I was only informed of it two hours before I had to fly back. I’ll return to Langley on Friday.”

“And why wasn’t I told?” asks Q, poking at the buttons on the oven. “Being the other head of the Double-Oh program and all.”

“M said he wanted to wait until I was back on English soil first. I believe you two have a meeting scheduled tomorrow morning? I assume he’ll tell you then.”

Q shakes his head slightly, mildly annoyed and mildly amused in equal parts. “I don’t know if I’ll ever get used to the fact that I am suddenly not your direct superior.”

Bond gives him a wry grin. “Technically, no one is my superior. I’m in my own chain of command, involving only _me._ We’re more of _partners_. _”_

“Don’t think I’ll forget it,” snipes Q jokingly. “So, would my _partner_ and _fellow head of the 00 division_ care to have dinner with me? We could discuss our new trainees over a nice bottle of wine. Strictly professional.”

Bond makes a jokingly disappointed _tisk-tisk_ noise. “Looks like we can’t sleep together, then. Strictly professional, and all. And here it was, the only thing getting me through that long flight.”

Q smacks him with the flat of the spoon. “For that, you don’t get any garlic bread.”

“Hey!”


	3. Chapter Two: Capital T

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Now,” he says, cuffing his sleeves, “who wants to fight?”

Chapter Two: Capital T 

March in London is a fickle thing: gentle spring flowers one day, torrential rain the next. This particular morning is more of the latter, making it hard for Q to drag himself out of bed. It’s only made harder by James, steadfastly refusing to let him up by slinging heavy arms over him. “How is it that you’re exempt from this meeting?” Q grouses.

Bond trains a sleepy smile on him. “Maybe ‘cause M knows I’d never come to one so early in the morning.”

“Mm, I could make you come, if I wanted.”

“You did,” remarks James, winding his arms only tighter around Q. “Twice last night, if I recall. I don’t know about you, but that sounds so much more fun than talking to M.”

“You’re a bad influence on me,” murmurs Q, but he lets his eyes fall closed again.

When he’s ten minutes late to the meeting, he finds he doesn’t mind one bit.

* * *

The Trainees, Capital T, as he and Bond privately refer to them, don’t respect him. He had known that that the first minute of the first day of their training a month and a half ago, when he’d walked into the gym room and saw their eyes glance over him and away again just as quickly. Dismissive. On one hand, he’s spent thirty some-odd years cultivating that particular air of subtle danger, and feels viciously pleased it’s working so well. On the other hand, however, if none of the Trainees, Capital T, have bothered to find out what the fourth highest ranking person in the entire SIS looks like, even if he does look like a seventy-year-old in a thirty-year-old body, he’s not sure why they were chosen in the first place.

Bond was drilling them on hand-to-hand, and they respected _him,_ the bloody lot of them, you could practically bottle the adoration in their eyes and sell it. When he slides up to stand behind Bond, watching him demonstrate slowly how to break an arm, he sees the biggest of the ten, Greyson, he thinks his name is, smirk. “Here to fix my computer?” he laughs, and elbows one of the others beside him, Reilly.

“That depends if it’s broken or not,” says Q evenly. “Speak to me that way again and I’ll be sure it is.” 

Greyson _ooo_ hs loudly, crossing his arms in the typically alpha-male stance that Q learned to loathe years before. He notices with some displeasure that Reilly and Shore follow suit in an instant, forming up around their de-facto leader. Beside him, Bond has stopped demonstrating, and is merely eying the three with that subtle look Q had only recently discovered was predatory. “Who do you think you are?” asks Greyson. When Q doesn’t respond, he immediately follows up with the expected: “Do you know who _I_ am?” 

It’s so perfect that he almost laughs. “I know exactly who you are. More importantly, however, Mr. Greyson, is _what_ you are. Do you know what that is?”

Greyson blinks, taken aback for the first time. But it’s the only sign of weakness he shows, the only sign of _anything_ he shows. Not as stoic as Bond or Alec or himself, but, well, they aren’t trainees for nothing. _Perhaps there’s a chance for you yet._ “And what is that?” Greyson asks, having quickly recovered his bravado.

With one fluid motion, Q flips off his cardigan and tosses it to the side. Underneath, he’s wearing the same thing as Bond: comfortable black sparring clothes.

This gives Greyson pause again, and Q can practically _see_ the wheels spinning in his head. It gives him no small bit of vicious glee. “You’re not ready. Do you know why I know that?” 

Greyson uncrosses and crosses his arms, for the first time looking truly uncertain. Beside him, Bond starts to chuckle. “Why?”

Q gives him a wicked grin. “Because when I walked in, you all looked at me and looked away. All you saw was what I wanted you to see. If this had been a mission, you’d already have failed.”

The fourth out of the ten Trainees, a girl who’d previously been at the back, steps forward to shoulder past Greyson and Reilly. “You’re the Quartermaster,” she says. “We’ve all heard of you.”

“And what have you heard?” he asks.

She shrugs. “That you’re brilliant, and a whiz with computers. That you’re ruthless, and dangerous, and quick. That you’re better than him.” She jerks her head at Bond.

“Everything you’ve said is true,” he agrees, “And yet, you’d have still failed your mission. Do you know why?”

The girl, Lin, narrows her eyes. “Why?”

“Because you’ve heard it, and yet you still don’t believe it. You still can’t recognize it. You would never notice me in a crowd, and yet I’ve done more damage than all of you combined.” A similar conversation in the National Gallery, so long ago, comes to his mind. _So why do you need me?_ But Bond had been twenty years experienced by then, working his way up the ranks kill by kill. It had taken two minutes to earn his respect, two days to earn his trust, two weeks to earn his never-ending loyalty.

And yet two years to earn his subservience.

It would take longer here. 

“I don’t care that you respect me for my own bloody ego,” says Q. “I don’t give a damn what you think of me outside of your work. But if you become an agent, while you are an agent, you will trust me, and you will follow me, and you will stay alive, because while you are out in the field my voice and my equipment and your training will be the only things between you and annihilation.”

Greyson snorts. “007 didn’t. Why should we?”

Bond’s eyes flash. With mirth or anger, Q can’t tell. “I died,” he says, lowly. “Try it sometime, I don’t recommend it.”

At that, Greyson falls silent, and Q steps forward onto the mat, toeing off his shoes. “Now,” he says, cuffing his sleeves, “who wants to fight?”


End file.
